It's no secret that teenagers are sometimes troubled, sometimes troublesome. In the United States a thriving $50 billion industry of so-called therapeutic boarding schools and military-style boot camps claims "tough love" is the best medicine to cure young people's problems. But as Tara Brown reports, these often-secretive institutions are largely unregulated, and far from assisting teenagers have actually caused them serious and lasting harm. Now survivors, led by celebrity "It Girl" Paris Hilton and including a brave Australian woman, have had enough and are demanding that parents stop outsourcing parenting.
Paris says she was taken from her bed at 4:30am when she was sixteen. Alongside her, Tara spoke with Emily, a young woman from Sydney who was sent overseas at fifteen, first to a wilderness program in Utah and then to a boarding school in Montana, as well as the survivor advocates of Unsilenced, and a parent who still believes in the programs.
The story was shot across California, Oklahoma and Utah, and the landscape became part of the storytelling. The wilderness programs sell isolation, so I wanted the pictures to feel vast and empty, and the Bonneville Salt Flats gave us exactly that. I moved between the Sony F55 with the Fujinon XK20-120 for the interviews, the FS5 and A7S III for the more mobile sequences, and the drone to show just how far from help these kids can be.
Watch the full story here.
